The table is tilted, the dice are loaded, the cards are marked, but the game goes on.

The New York Times Has a Fatal Wall Street Bias

A few years back, when William D. Cohan was writing for Bloomberg News, one could reliably count on him to hold Wall Street’s feet to the fire. Now Cohan is writing for the New York Times and it feels like the Times sent him for an in-house lobotomy or at least a crash course in reoriented thinking.

Consider Cohan’s article from yesterday in the Times, titled Why Washington Needs Wall Street. First Cohan piles on to the recent bashing of Senator Elizabeth Warren by Roger Lowenstein in the pages of the Times. Warren has led a meaningful, multi-year charge to expose the failed reforms and lapdog regulators overseeing Wall Street, which is hands-down the most corrupt industry in America and located in the same home town as the New York Times. (If you can’t clean up your own home town, what good are you?)

Cohan calls Warren a demagogue, writing that “she goes overboard and seems like she is receiving way too much gratification getting headlines and television time for her stern and condescending lectures.” (If the business model of your industry is fraud – as Senator Bernie Sanders has correctly stated and the serial charges of crimes further attest – can anything said about you be condescending?)

But here’s where Cohan really flips wildly from his former personality. Cohan writes that there’s a “drumbeating” coming from the likes of Senator Bernie Sanders, Warren and former Labor Secretary Robert Reich to prevent anyone with a Wall Street background from filling cabinet or subcabinet posts if Clinton becomes the next President. Cohan now sees this as a bad thing, writing:

“The fact is that many jobs in Washington could be filled by someone with a Wall Street background to the benefit of the American people. What better way to improve the inner workings of the capital markets than by having someone with the authority to regulate them who knows precisely how they work, or how they are manipulated.”

Now consider the tune Cohan was whistling just a little over three years ago at Bloomberg News. Cohan wrote:

“…we get stuck again and again with people whose ties to Wall Street run deep. Indeed, the ‘revolving door’ between Wall Street and Washington seems to have been spinning faster than ever during the first five years of Barack Obama’s administration, contrary to what candidate Obama led us to expect. Is it just a coincidence that the president’s most important economic advisers — Jack Lew, the Treasury secretary; Sylvia Mathews Burwell, his choice to head the Office of Management and Budget; Gene Sperling, the director of the National Economic Council; and Michael Froman, a senior White House economic adviser — are all acolytes of Robert Rubin, the former Treasury secretary and longtime Wall Street honcho at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Citigroup Inc.?”

Thanks to WikiLeaks, the American people no longer have to guess why President Obama promised meaningful change and then stuffed his administration with Wall Street cronies. Emails released by WikiLeaks show that in the months leading up to Obama’s 2008 election win, Michael Froman, an executive at Citigroup, was emailing Obama and his advisers with the recommended personnel that he and his cronies wanted to see in the new administration. (See our coverage here and here.) Almost without exception, Wall Street got its way…